About Barney Smith

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So far Barney Smith has created 160 blog entries.

The Eden Project

By Barney Smith Lots of people have heard of the Eden Project, but far fewer have actually visited it. This is a record of some of our impressions as we joined the second, more restricted, group. The Eden project is a huge environmental and educational project, undertaken to show that humans have a good side [...]

By |2022-01-27T15:24:15+00:00January 27th, 2022|General|Comments Off on The Eden Project

Greening Potash

By Barney Smith It is instructive to realise that “sustainable” now reaches into areas which would have been hard to imagine even five years ago. The other day I came across a circular about Potash, about which I was up to then ignorant (and not just about “sustainable” potash) Potash, as I am sure you [...]

By |2022-01-11T10:04:44+00:00January 11th, 2022|General|Comments Off on Greening Potash

The Drax Group has become controversial because it has agreed to re-open its two dormant coal power plants

The Drax group is still centred on the eponymous power station in Selby, Yorkshire, which in 2012 was the biggest coal-fired power station in the UK, providing nearly seven per cent of the electricity consumed in the UK from its’ six furnaces. Drax was controversial because it used coal. Today, the same Drax power station [...]

By |2021-11-23T20:35:06+00:00November 23rd, 2021|Drax Plc|Comments Off on The Drax Group has become controversial because it has agreed to re-open its two dormant coal power plants

India and China blight the COP26 deal by refusing to phase out coal

By Barney Smith The second week of COP 26 and its conclusion were no worse than we had expected, though that hardly commends the outcome. It seems that no country, (not even the host nation) was prepared to go the extra mile “for the planet”. But one might ask how important the future of the [...]

By |2021-11-18T11:23:01+00:00November 17th, 2021|Articles, Features|Comments Off on India and China blight the COP26 deal by refusing to phase out coal

COP 26: the first week

By Barney Smith It was never going to be plain sailing: we all expected Boris to try to wing it with a few platitudes and a couple of Jokes and we were not disappointed. He did, the outcome was somewhat predictable. Not that it was ever going to be easy. The Indians were the first [...]

By |2021-11-09T08:49:15+00:00November 9th, 2021|General|Comments Off on COP 26: the first week

COP 26

By Barney Smith From 31 October to 12 November the UK will chair the UN Conference on Climate Change in Glasgow (COP 26). This meeting is designed to follow on from the Paris conference 5 years ago which agreed that the world should try to limit the increase in global warming to 1.5 per cent [...]

By |2021-10-25T09:12:44+00:00October 26th, 2021|General|Comments Off on COP 26

Offshore wind farms could become more efficient because of new technology that is emergin

By Barney Smith In September 2021 the Global Wind Energy Council produced a report on off-shore wind for 2020 which showed an increase of 6.1 GW, year on year. This was the second largest increase on record and constituted a 15 per cent increase on existing estimates. The cumulative total is now 35 GW. The [...]

By |2021-10-22T15:55:59+00:00October 21st, 2021|Articles|Comments Off on Offshore wind farms could become more efficient because of new technology that is emergin

UK Hydrogen Policy

By Barney Smith Last week the UK Government produced the long-awaited Hydrogen policy strategy which seeks to put some flesh on the bones of the “Ten-Point plan for a Green Industrial Revolution” launched by the Prime Minister in November 2020. Crucially, it recognises the importance of hydrogen within that overall plan. The strategy notes that [...]

By |2021-08-24T08:44:13+00:00August 24th, 2021|Energy Storage|Comments Off on UK Hydrogen Policy

Oxford PV

By Barney Smith Oxford PV is a private company, originally a spin-off from Oxford University, with world-class expertise in the use of perovskite photovoltaics and solar cells. The firm’s web-site states “its low-cost, highly efficient photovoltaic technology, when integrated with standard silicon solar cells, will dramatically improve performance”. Their tandem solar cells will deliver significantly [...]

By |2021-08-19T09:12:05+00:00August 18th, 2021|Solar|Comments Off on Oxford PV

The True Potential of Renewables

By Barney Smith An analysis of the historic cost trends of energy technologies shows that the decades-long increase in the deployment of renewable energy systems has consistently coincided with steep reductions in their costs. The cost of solar photovoltaics has, for example, declined by three orders of magnitude over the last fifty years. Similar trends [...]

By |2021-08-10T17:11:32+00:00August 10th, 2021|General|Comments Off on The True Potential of Renewables
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